Plan Your Trip Times Picks

AN ISLAND THAT SUMS UP HAWAII

By CHARLES LOCKWOOD; Charles Lockwood, a frequent visitor to Hawaii, is the author of seven books about American cities and architecture

Published: June 28, 1987

Other islands may be larger, have flashier hotels and restaurants and boast more shopping and golf courses. But Kauai may be the most beautiful and most varied of all the Hawaiian Islands.

Its sights include jungle-covered hillsides festooned with wild orchids and red bougain-villea, rugged Waimea Canyon -- described by Mark Twain as the Grand Canyon of the Pacific -- crescent-shaped beaches with hardly a footprint to be seen, cloud-shrouded 5,200-foot Mount Waialeale, often called the wettest spot on earth, and the dramatic Na Pali coast, a succession of needlelike mountains and steep rocky cliffs from which waterfalls drop hundreds of feet into the rolling surf.

Some travelers manage to see the island by arriving one morning and leaving the next. But it really takes four or five days to savor Kauai's natural charms fully.

To visit Kauai's sunny south coast and nearby Waimea Canyon, travelers should take Route 50 (the Kaumuali Highway) west from Lihue. For breakfast, you might want to try Eggbert's at 4483 Rice Street, just south of Route 50, where the reasonably priced omelets are a local institution.

Don't worry if you linger so long on the south coast that you can't reach Waimea Canyon the same day, Kauai is so cmpact -- just 553 square miles and much of that occupied by rugged mountains in the roadless interior -- that you can head directly for Waimea Canyon the next day without spending too much time retracing the previous day's route.

West of Lihue, well-maintained two-lane Route 50 passes through occasional fields of bananas, papayas and taro, the potato-like root from which Hawaiians still make poi, a starchy mush that was once the mainstay of the local diet. The usual sight along the highway, however, is vast sugarcane fields that extend for several miles in the foothills on the right and almost the same distance down the ocean's edge on the left.

Several miles from Lihue, turn left on Route 520, then follow Route 530 from Koloa, and proceed to Poipu Beach on the south shore, a drive of about 15 minutes. One of the sunniest spots on Kauai, Poipu Beach Park offers good swimming and snorkeling. Nearby, Brennecke's Beach boasts the island's best bodysurfing because of its moderate-size waves and sandy beach and ocean bottom.

After leaving Poipu, visitors can quickly return to Route 50 by way of Routes 520 and 530. Or they may want to visit the Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden in the nearby Lawai Valley. Just be sure to make tour reservations well in advance.

Chartered by Congress in 1964 as a scientific research center, the privately financed 186-acre Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden cultivates and studies tropical species from around the world, particularly those in danger of extinction. The guided tours, for example, point out more than 500 species of palms, 50 kinds of bananas and 100 varieties of flowering coral trees, plus dense groves of bamboo, 100-foot rubber trees and stands of red-flowering ginger, among many other speicmens.

The tours also visit the adjacent 100-acre Allerton estate overlooking Lawai Bay. In the 1880's, this splendid site was a vacation retreat of Queen Emma, wife of King Kamehameha IV, and visitors can see her cottage as well as the centuries-old taro terraces and stone walls that the late Robert Allerton incorporated into this estate's gardens during the 1930's. Mr. Allerton also planted many tropical trees and shrubs at the Pacific Tropical Botanical Garden, and his son, John Gregg Allerton, has continued this work and willed his estate to the institutuion.

Shortly after you return to Route 50 and pass the village of Kalaheo, a good place to stop is the well-marked Hanapepe Overlook on the right side of the road. Here you can look down on the lush farms and thick vegetation of the Hanapepe Valley, which is surrounded by steep cliffs.

To see what Kauai's south shore looked like before the tourist boom in the 1970's, follow the highway turnoff into Hanapepe rather than the main road off to the left, and you enter the main streeet of the town, which resembles old Hawaii more authentically than any would-be Polynesian reconstruction. One and two-story frame uildings have Wild West-style false fronts. The sidewalks are wooden. The Aloha Theater is modestly Art Deco in style. Scarcely anything has changed in Hanapepe for decades except that the sidewalks are now empty, the store windows are bare and the little movie theater is closed.

''Seeing Hanapepe today, it's hard to think that it once was the busiest town on this side of the island,'' said Sarah Sheldon, a lifelong Kauai resident. ''Hanapepe had everything you could want - banks, the post office, a litle church, barber shop, movie theater, plenty of shops, including a general store where everything was neatly stored in wooden drawers. But the town started dying little by little after the construction of the highway bypass and the opening of a nearby shopping center. By the early 1970's, it had become the virtual ghost town that you see today.''